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Continental Flight 3407

News about Continental Flight 3407, including commentary and archival articles published in The New York Times. More

Updated May 15, 2009

Continental Connection Flight 3407 from Newark crashed in Clarence Center, N.Y., about five miles northwest of its intended landing at Buffalo Niagara International Airport, on Feb. 12, 2009. Fifty people were killed, including a man in a house that the plane hit when it plunged to the ground.

The victims included Alison L. Des Forges, a human rights advocate and chronicler of the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and Beverly Eckert, who became a prominent spokeswoman for the families of 9/11 victims after her husband, Sean P. Rooney, was killed in the World Trade Center attacks.

Early speculation about the cause of the crash focused on icing, but the National Transportation Safety Board said that analysis of the flight data recorder showed ice did not make much of a difference in the aircraft's performance.

In May, investigators said that the plane, a Bombardier Dash 8 Q400, may have crashed because of an inappropriate response by the pilots to an automatic safety system. The system sensed that the plane, as it prepared to land, might have been flying too slowly to stay in the air, given its angle to the oncoming wind; this put it at risk for an aerodynamic stall that would result in the wings losing lift.

In hearings on the crash, the safety board will address, among other issues, whether small planes are as safe as big ones. Regulations for large and small planes are almost identical, but since the last fatal crash involving a large jet, in November 2001, there have been four fatal crashes involving commuter planes.

The hearings will also examine how the two pilots reacted to a safety system warning them that they were flying too low, and whether their commute to work, combined with their job schedules, might have left them too tired to think clearly.

In the first two days of hearings, members of the board said that the crew was set up for fatigue and inattention before they even took off, partly because of the structure of the commuter airline business. The transcript from the crash included a conversation that violated protocol. The head of the National Transportation Safety Board told executives of Colgan Air that paying new pilots very low wages without taking into account that some would commute across the country to their jobs constituted "winking and nodding" at safety policy.